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When the plane pulled out and disap- peared over the summit, the yell died like the howl at Ebbets Field when the ball looks as if it's going into the bleach- ers and then is snagged by a visiting outfielder. It was a Messerschmitt, all '..", right. A couple of minutes later every one of the German planes had disap- peared, with our ships after them like a squad of heavy-footed comedy cops chasing small boys. The fellows who had ducked for cov- er hoisted themselves off the ground and iooked around for the mess things they had dropped. They were excited and sheepish, as they always are after a strafe party. It is humiliating to have someone run you away, so you make a joke about it. One soldier yelled to ,: another) "When you said 'Flop!' I was there already!" Another, who spoke with a Brooklyn accent, shouted, "J eez, those tracers looked just like Luna Park! " W e formed the chow line again and one fellow yelled to a friend, "What would you recommend as a good, safe place to eat?" "Lindy's, at Fifty-first Street," the other soldier answered. "The way the guys ran, it was like a Christmas rush at Macy's," somebody else said. Everybody tried hard to be casual. Our appetites were even better than they had been before, the excitement having joggled up our internal secre- tions. There were arguments about whether the plane that had escaped over the mountain would crash before reach- ing the German lines. I was scraping the last bits of stew from my mess tin with a sliver of hard biscuit when a soldier came up and told me that Major , whom I had never met, had been killed on the field, that five men had been wounded, and that one A-20 bomber had been ruined on the ground. "} AFTER I had washed up my tins, .r-l.. I walked over to the P -40 squad- ron operations shack, because I wanted to talk to a pilot familiarly known as Horse about a fight he had been in two days before. The day it had happened I had been visiting a P-38 squadron's headquarters on the field. I had seen eight P-38's go out to attack some Ger- man tanks and only five come back, two of them badly damaged. A lot of F ocke- Wulf 190's had attacked the P-38's over the target, and Horse and three other P-40 pilots, who were protecting the 38's, had been up above the 190's. Horse was a big fellow with a square, . tan face and a blond beard. He came from a town called Quanah, in Texas, and he was always showing his friends a tinted picture of his girl, who was in the Waves. Horse was twenty-five, which made him practically a patriarch in that squadron, and everybody knew that he was being groomed to command a squadron of his own when he got his captaincy. He was something of a wit. Once I heard one of the other boys say that now that the field had been in operation for six weeks, he thought it was time the men should bUIld a show- er bath. "The next thing we know," Horse said, "you'll be wanting to send home for your wife." I found Horse and asked him about the fight. He said he was sorry that the 38's had had such a bad knock. "I guess maybe it was partly our fault," he said. "Four of our ships had been sent out to be high cover for the 3 8's. They didn't see any 38's or Jerries either, so when their gas was beginning to run low they started for home. My- self and three other fellows had started out to relieve them and we passed them as they came back. The 38's must have arrived over the tanks just then, and the 190's must have been hiding at the base of a cloud bank above the 38's but far below us. When we got directly over the area, we could see tracers flying way down on the deck. The 190's had dived from the cloud and bounced the 38's, who never had a chance, and the 38's were streaking for home. We start- ed down toward the 190's, but it takes a P-40 a long time to get anywhere and we couldn't help. Then four more 190's dived from way up top and bounced us. I looped up behind one of them as he dived. My two wing men were right with me. I put a good burst into the sonofabitch and he started to burn, and I followed him down. I must have fired a hundred and twenty-five rounds from each gun. It was more fun than a county fair. Gray, my fourth man, put a lot of lead into another 190, and I doubt if it ever got home. The other two J erries just kept on going." . The P-40 operations shack was set deep in the ground and had a double tier of bunks along three of its walls. Sand and grass were heaped over the top of the shack, and the pilots said that even when they flew right over it, it was hard to see, which cheered, them consid- erably. The pilots were flying at least two missions a day and spent most of the rest of the time lying in the bunks in their flying clothes, under as many coats and blankets as they could find. The at- mosphere in the shack was a thick por-